With all of the tension in the forum lately, I think it is important to talk about our stories of what brought us here and why we are here. Please share yours, here is mine
@luis and @jorge made a very ambitious and revolutionary move when they decided that it was best for the Aragon Network to decentralize its development. Here is a story of how our dreams for the world have started to intersect.
I was drawn to contribute to the Aragon ecosystem due to the ideals and mission of the organization, combined with the offering of a technology stack that enables application development that can be tightly coupled with customizable governance systems. This was particularly important for the governance system I was designing for Space Decentral.
While we are all here on a common mission binded by the Aragon manifesto, I think one beauty of the network is the diversity of dreams of where we want to see the technology in action. A lot of us aren’t only application developers — we are also people that want to build living, breathing, long-lasting DAOs that are running on Aragon.
I quit my Product Management job at Oracle in July 2016 so I could focus on finishing courses I was taking in a certificate program on “Spacecraft Propulsion” and “Spacecraft Structures”. I was so fucking stoked to start preparing my grad school applications (the GRE seemed really annoying though). Instead of that path, there was another idea that surfaced about creating a space mission collaboration platform - a collective intelligence network where we can crowdfund and crowdsource space missions.
I had met @topocount, an engineer at Autark, at a NASA Space Apps hackathon a few months prior. We co-founded Space Cooperative together with this mission, but it was mostly a volunteer project with people contributing outside their day jobs, but I was on it full-time - living off some sparse Oracle stocks and the small investment I made in Ethereum in the summer of 2016 shortly after The DAO hack.
In April of 2017, 6 months after founding Space Cooperative, a friend that works for the Kraken cryptocurrency exchange, who I met at a meetup in 2015 where Vitalik spoke, convinced me that the blockchain was perfect for our project. During this conversation, I remembered that a few weeks prior I had read an article by the futurist Giulio Prisco “A Decentralized Autonomous Space Agency” and took it as a sign to reach out to him. He had a Facebook group called “Space Decentral” and I joined it and we decided to combine missions. Radek who is now part of Autark was in this group too.
It was around January 2018 when it become completely logical that Aragon was the missing piece of the puzzle that was going to bring our Space DAO vision off the ground. I had met @lkngtn on some chats and shared the governance paper with him, while I was evaluating various platforms such as DAOstack. But Aragon won me over for the both the ideals and the architecture.
We were planning an ICO for Space Decentral, and a portion of the budget from the ICO was going to be reserved for Aragon App development. We needed Aragon that much.
When the Nest grant program was announced by the Aragon project, things started to connect. @Quazia’s visions started to really intersect with ours and we combined forces to build That Planning Tab aka That Planning Suite aka Open Enterprise.
It was definitely a struggle getting acquainted with the stack back then - we had developers new to smart contract development and everyone was new to Aragon app development. We were focused on building the apps then, not enhancing the aragonSDK. And we are still learning as we go along today.
While we have gone all in on Aragon, Space Decentral - Aragon’s first space agency is still in the back of our minds. I’ve been trying to find a lead for Space Decentral, because I am recognizing how much more development needs to occur for Aragon to bring that vision to life. I don’t believe that this is self-serving at all because my thesis is the tools that Space Decentral needs are tools a lot of other organizations will need too - just like we see people using Open Enterprise today who aren’t planning on building space settlements
Allowing the ordinary citizen to participate in a global space program is a fight for freedom when you view it from another angle. It will lead toward the breakdown of nation-states and the calm realizations that with digital jurisdictions we can really tap into the most authentic part of our nature, not one that has been imposed upon us based on imaginary borders. We can tap into our evolutionary drive to explore and expand.
Project humanity 50 years out. My dream is that we will say “Aragon is the technology that prevented the science fiction dystopias. Aragon is the technology that put us on the path towards worlds that are like Star Trek.”
Onwards & Upwards!
Note: some of my story above was pulled from a few articles/interviews, such as this one